INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Last week, I talked with Mike Volpi, longtime Index Ventures partner and the former head of M-A at Cisco for many years before that
We originally planned to talk about Index and general market trends, and we did
The topics we discussed included whether self-driving technologies have attracted too much funding and the damage inflicted by SoftBank on
its portfolio companies.
Still, few could have predicted how extraordinarily trying the week would be leading up to our interview
Little wonder we spent much of our time talking about who is likely to snap shut their checkbook first, and why, in some cases, the best
thing to do now is to keep the money flowing.
We have parts of our conversation available in podcast form here; other pieces, including
those not included in the podcast, follow
These excerpts have been lightly edited for length.
Mike Volpi on the art of board membership
TechCrunch: Let talk first about Index
You closed your last funds in 2018 with $1.65 billion in capital commitments
Are you in the market again now?
Mike Volpi: We raise funds every three-ish years
So, at some point, yeah, we&ll be in the market again
[We are] not specifically at this point in time, but sooner or later we&ll raise another fund.
More broadly speaking — and because the
market is tanking so badly as we speak — do LPs tend to snap their checkbooks shut as soon as trouble hits? What been your experience over
